I’ve been spending a high percentage of my internet time lately on my “Poems about Paintings” facebook page. ( https://www.facebook.com/home.php ) This is generally a positive thing, because it keeps me writing, I generally come up with two or three new poems every day. Of course, some of them wouldn’t stand up on their own, they are more of a rhyming caption for the painting than a poem in their own right, but I’m writing a lot, so if one or two of them out of ten are good, then it’s a good thing.

A recent addition

It’s also a good thing because it cuts into the time I can obsess about politics. There are enough people out there writing crap about politics and I’m not convincing anybody. Also, I think the solutions to the main problems facing the human race -a clean water supply, global warming, overpopulation, illiteracy, the death of the honey bee, the possibility of a 7.4 earthquake hitting Manhattan, an asteroid strike, the Yellowstone volcano – are going to be technical and not political. They must be, if there is any possibility of saving the human race because politically, we are idiots.

One thing is that I spend so much time looking at people’s paintings that I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all. I am drowning in art. I guess that’s the end result of social media. You will drown in something, and it will be the genre of your own choosing. For some people it’s cat videos. For a few people I know it’s chess.

The weird thing about it is, though, I’m not good at art, and I’m not even good as an amateur critic. I’m just looking for pieces with something, anything, that jogs my mind, that I can attach a couple of words to, and expand those words to a poem.

So, it’s kind of surprising that there is actually a lot of good art on the page, but it’s more of a coincidence than good management.